


Tales from the Edge

by Marsalias



Series: The Edge Institute [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Fantasy, Gen, Paranormal Investigators, Supernatural Procedural, chapters are in nonchronological order
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 14:53:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29420412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marsalias/pseuds/Marsalias
Summary: Short stories set in the Edge Institute universe!The Edge Institute is one of the most reputable paranormal research foundations in the country.  Sure, one of the interns keeps getting kidnapped by the fae, no one has ever actually seen the person in charge, one of the employees is still on payroll despite being dead, all the tech guys are part of an ever-twisting love tesseract, and that one guy is using an Apple 2 computer.  But it's all fine.  They know what they're doing.
Series: The Edge Institute [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2161269
Comments: 18
Kudos: 80





	Tales from the Edge

“Where are you going?” Deer asked, looking up from her soup to glare at Johannsson with suspicion. 

“Mail just came in,” said Johannsson, gesturing at the mail light. The Institute’s driveway was long, and the mailbox was at the very end of it, so, to prevent extraneous trips, they had a sensor in it that sent a signal when the mailbox was full. It was a recent addition. “I’m going to go get it.”

“No, you’re not,” said Deer. 

“What? Why?”

“Johannsson, _when_ was the mail light put in? I can tell you right now that it wasn’t forty years ago.”

“I’m not going to touch the sensor!” protested Johannsson. 

“Don’t want to risk it. Besides, this is why we have interns.”

Zoe, on the other side of the break room, looked up with an expression of betrayal on her face. “What?”

“Mail,” said Deer. “Go get it.”

“I work for Research.”

“You’re an intern. You work for everyone. Besides, half of our mail is for research in the first place.”

Zoe scowled and spitefully shoved the rest of her sandwich into her mouth. “Fine,” she said, spraying crumbs. “I will. But if I get kidnapped on the way there, it’s your fault.”

“You’re just walking down the driveway,” said Deer. “Don’t be so dramatic.”

“Your fault,” repeated Zoe, stabbing a finger at Deer as she walked through the door. 

A few seconds later, she was back. She strode across the room to steal a loaf of bread and left again. 

“What was that about?” asked Deer.

“I think bread is supposed to help against fairies,” said Johannsson. 

“Really? Why don’t we use that?”

“Some fairies,” amended Johannsson.

“That makes sense,” said Deer. 

.

It was a beautiful day. Really. 

Unfortunately, kidnappings tended to happen on beautiful days. Zoe squared her shoulders before stepping from the nice, air-conditioned lobby into the scorching outdoor heat. She sighed and trudged out into the parking lot. 

Her palms sweated where they touched the plastic bread bag, and she kept switching it back and forth between her hands in an attempt to make it less uncomfortable to hold. There was a breeze, but it was only barely strong enough to make the wheat planted on either side of the driveway rustle and whisper. 

Stupid grass. Stupid internship.

She reached the mailbox and groaned as she saw the package shoved in it. Packages were _supposed_ to be driven all the way up to the front door. Especially packages that didn’t fit completely in the mailbox. What if it had started raining?

The sun beat down on her, indicating exactly how likely that was. 

Okay, so this was more about the inconvenience to her, personally, than anything else. If Johannsson had come back complaining about having to carry one measly package, she’d have teased him. A lot. 

With some effort, she yanked the box free and frowned at the places the cardboard had been pinched and warped by being squeezed into the mailbox. Hopefully, there wasn’t anything fragile inside. 

The box was heavier than expected. 

She shifted the mail, bread, and box around in her hands, trying to find a comfortable way to hold the items, before giving up. The driveway wasn’t that long. 

About halfway back, she adjusted the box in her hands. If she didn’t know better, she’d say that it was getting heavier. Maybe she should start weight training again. But it took so _long._ Ugh. 

Speaking of long… She looked over her shoulder, back at the mailbox. The unpleasant heat really was drawing this out, wasn’t it?

Yeah. No. This had gone on for too long. She broke into an awkward jog, her eyes staying steady on the front of the building. 

It wasn’t getting closer. She stopped and pulled out her phone. No service. Not even wifi. Typical. She turned around and walked back to the mailbox. 

At least, she tried to go back to the mailbox. It wasn’t getting any closer, either. So much for messing with the mailbox sensor to send an SOS. 

The box was heavy. 

Okay. She wanted words with whoever had gotten the obviously cursed thing sent through their regular mail. That had to be against Institute regulations. 

She knelt, settling the box on her lap. She could open the box, but direct contact tended to be contraindicated in the case of most cursed things. So. Time to try to figure out what it could be and how to get rid of it. 

Yay. 

Well. She _did_ work for the Research Department. 

Something that grew heavier the more you carried it… The only thing that came to mind were the false children of the ubume, a Japanese yokai. But those usually _looked_ like children until you stopped, and, to the best of her knowledge, they didn’t have any space-warping properties. 

Going at this from the other data point… Ugh. Too many things warped space. She didn’t even know where to start. 

Good thing she wasn’t planning on putting this on her resume. 

Question: Would it be safe to just yeet the thing into the wheat? 

She made a face. It would probably be better to avoid the yeeting for now. She didn’t want to _lose_ the thing, in case she had to kick the hell out of it or something to get it to stop trapping her. Chucking it as far away from herself as possible would come later. She put it down on the side of the driveway, where some weeds were starting to come up. Hopefully, this wouldn’t turn out to be one of those cursed objects that punish the victim for trying to get rid of them. 

She walked away, towards the Institute. 

Ten minutes later, she almost walked by the package. She groaned and glared at the offending object. Great. 

Another option she had was just waiting until someone sent out search parties, but she might be in a pocket dimension or something stupid like that. There were too many incidents out there where a person disappeared, only to reappear in their last known location but dead from exposure. 

Andi, her parent, could probably find her despite that. They always managed to find her in faerie, which was… Not anything like a pocket dimension, once she got down to particulars, but still. On the other hand, Andi would _definitely_ give her grief for getting stuck in a pocket dimension on a mail run.

No, wait, there were other things she could do first. Like walking into the wheat. 

Stupid grass was going to poke her so much. She’d probably wind up with half a ton of seeds in her socks. 

This whole thing was so inconvenient. She could be doing so many more useful things. 

She renewed her promise to have a _discussion_ with whoever had put this stupid thing in with the regular mail. She turned ninety degrees and stepped off the road. 

Ten minutes of walking through grass later, she stepped back onto the driveway. Honestly, she hadn’t expected that to work. Whatever. 

Time to peel this baby. 

… She was actively cursed. If she wanted to make fun of the unboxing event from hell, she very well could. 

She knelt again, asphalt hot under her knees. She brushed away a bit of gravel that pressed against her skin. 

Why was there so much tape on this? 

Some old person packaged this. She just _knew._

Finally, she tore the cardboard open to reveal—

Newspaper. 

She rolled her eyes and pulled it back aaaaaaand okiedokie. That was creepy. That was a freaking stone baby. A… What was it called? A lithopedion. Calcified unborn fetus. 

Totally haunted. Yep. A ghost this close would normally set off the alarms in the Detection Department, but they missed things, sometimes. Like the Great Fae that kidnapped her last month. 

Provisionally, she decided to blame Mark, the Institute’s ghost expert and a member of the Containment Department, for this. 

“I’m not your mom,” she said, hoping that would settle this. “Or your dad. I’m not old enough. Well—” she rolled her eyes “— _technically,_ physically I’m old enough, but I’m not, like. Emotionally ready for a kid. Or to die trapped in the driveway at the place I work on a mail run. I mean, really. That would be a sucky way to go. I mean, I’ve been in sword duels with faeries.”

She stood up. 

“Let’s try this again.”

Ten minutes later she saw the creepy stone baby on the ground in front of her. Stubborn thing. 

“Like, I’m more than willing to stomp the hell out of you if you don’t uncurse me,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. 

That wasn’t one hundred percent true. If this was a ghost, breaking its vessel might break its power, or it might free it. Ghosts tended not to know that, though.

“One more try,” she said. 

Ten minutes later, she was in exactly the same place as she was before. 

Time for stomping. She raised her foot.

A fairy dove out of the grass to fight her. He had a sword. She smacked him with the loaf of bread, which did nothing, and glared with disgust at the stone baby. It was just _delaying._ This whole thing was an illusion. Stupid illusion rock baby thing. She’d probably break it and find out that she’d bypassed the Institute entirely and was standing in a stupid field somewhere. Or maybe she’d been going in a loop, considering that she was still near the thing. 

The fight with the ‘fairy’ turned into rolling on the ground and hair pulling. This was by design. Eventually she got within grabbing distance of the stone baby, grabbed it, and brained the ‘fairy’ with it. Then she slammed it on the ground. It splintered, shards cutting into her hand.

The ‘fairy’ vanished.

Zoe took a deep breath. Cool. That was over then. Yay. 

Now she’d—

Oh, no. 

The _mail._

.

Deer looked up from her desk as the door opened, saw it was Zoe, and looked back at her email before doing a double-take. 

“What happened to you?” she asked, standing. “Are you okay?”

Zoe raised a single finger. “I want to know,” she said, “who is sending cursed stone babies through the regular mail.” She dumped a bunch of rock on Deer’s desk. 

For several long moments, Deer stared at it. “We’re going to need another session on our shipping policy for hazardous objects.”

“You think?”


End file.
